A Very Stupid KM Question

The newspaper carried an article on companies that are afraid to lose their experienced personnel because of retirement. I'll provide the "very stupid KM question" right away: is it not the essence of KM to take action before it goes wrong? I think the article, which appeared in De Volkskrant written by Leonoor Meijer, captured it quite nicely. Some (translated) citations:

• "Give me a job that suites me and I'll never have to work again", Aristotle. That is a clever one, applies to me :-).
• The idea that a young (cheap, inexperienced) employee could replace an old (expensive, experienced) employee was wrong.
• If one has not invested in an employee for 35 years, it is very difficult to talk about a career when the employee is 55.
• It is essential that a company takes the age distribution of it's employees into account.

So, here we have a lot of employees working at (industrial) companies for a very long time. They want to retire, and the companies still need them. Something went wrong perhaps?

Although the term knowledge management was not in the article, the issues raised seem of prime importance to the field.